After Meriye B. Ouzounian
by Knar Gavin
O, captains of infamy, again
you’ve battered and eaten the world.
Borges had it almost right. Every cata
clysm happens for the first time,
and in a wash that is infernal.
With fighting
fossil capitalism
there’ve been attempts — over the sink
and under the moon, some white-lit
trying, as if
to cleanse
buttered hands
with cold water.
Our bodies are shitting credit cards
by the week, so plastiform is this life.
Some things work themselves into you,
and that is the only getting them gone.
Where we might’ve broken bread
or even
broken it off with the land-swallowers
instead capital’s tyrant uncles drove
their straws beneath beautiful surfaces
to guzzle past and future all at once.
When we think of tenure
we ought to think
of the land, &
of those who
would hold
nothing
back
to get
to a settled future.
Catastrophe fills the scope, but my Armenian blood knows
brutality is as old as the fossil record.
I remember my great, great
grandfather, Krikor. Buried alive, but first
he put mud on our faces
so we wouldn’t look pretty.
I realize, now, that I am in the situation of communication
where Krikor could not be.
The truth is
in the pudding,
& its still blood. Or,
the medium is
the massage that
structure will have been.
Krikor,
he had pigeons
he left all.
This full world is in flight for the stationed few.
O, Sinemas and, likewise, Pelosis and Kochs,
O, Manchins — hot wives in cold houses
amidst this inferno
of a near-future 4-degrees.
I vow this: to cut the arms off every lifeboat. (1)
To let them, all lovers of pigeons, survive the road out,
to tear the fossil-hankering factory down, glitch
the bone machine
with the incandescent power of those
neither wealthy nor insatiable
to wretch and howl the brute money men down.
Petes Buttigieg, Brians Deese: we’re coming.
We’ve got mud on our faces
and pigeon eyes in the millions.
We will not look pretty.
We will not back down.
(1) See Christian Parenti on the politics of the armed lifeboat, which he elaborates within the context of the climate crisis: “Political adaptation presents stark choices. There is a real risk that strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse.” See Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Nation Books, 2011).